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Mechanistic Explanations At Work
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Book Synopsis Mechanistic Explanations at Work by : Mark Dietrich Tschaepe
Download or read book Mechanistic Explanations at Work written by Mark Dietrich Tschaepe and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work I argue that mechanistic explanations are to be understood as tools for solving exigencies when we account for pragmatic considerations in formulating such explanations. My focus is on pragmatic considerations in regard to neural explanations for behavior, specifically mechanistic explanations for pair bonding, which are to be utilized in explaining monogamous behavior. In order to make this argument, I introduce the reader to mechanisms and mechanistic explanations, pragmatics and pragmatic considerations, and current mechanism sketches for monogamous behavior. I then make the argument that mechanistic explanations are tools for solving exigencies. I also pose possible objections to the argument for a technological understanding of mechanistic explanations. These possible objections included issues stemming from the use of models, neural explanations for behavioral exigencies, and the instrumentalism implicit in a technological approach to mechanistic explanations. Finally, I provide a brief conclusion to my argument, followed by the suggestion that the account of pragmatic considerations regarding mechanistic explanations put forth in this work pertains to other domains of discourse and behavior.
Book Synopsis Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond by : Brigitte Falkenburg
Download or read book Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond written by Brigitte Falkenburg and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a broad, philosophical discussion on mechanical explanations. Coverage ranges from historical approaches and general questions to physics and higher-level sciences . The contributors also consider the topics of complexity, emergence, and reduction. Mechanistic explanations detail how certain properties of a whole stem from the causal activities of its parts. This kind of explanation is in particular employed in explanatory models of the behavior of complex systems. Often used in biology and neuroscience, mechanistic explanation models have been often overlooked in the philosophy of physics. The authors correct this surprising neglect. They trace these models back to their origins in physics. The papers present a comprehensive historical, methodological, and problem-oriented investigation. The contributors also investigate the conditions for using models of mechanistic explanations in physics. The last papers make the bridge from physics to economics, the theory of complex systems and computer science . This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy of science, scientific explanation, complex systems, models of explanation in physics higher level sciences, and causal mechanisms in science.
Book Synopsis The Twenty-First Century Mechanistic Theory of Human Cognition by : Diego Azevedo Leite
Download or read book The Twenty-First Century Mechanistic Theory of Human Cognition written by Diego Azevedo Leite and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a theoretical critical appraisal of the Mechanistic Theory of Human Cognition (MTHC), which is one of the most popular major theories in the contemporary field of cognitive science. It analyses and evaluates whether MTHC provides a unifying account of human cognition and its explanation. The book presents a systematic investigation of the internal and external consistency of the theory, as well as a systematic comparison with other contemporary major theories in the field. In this sense, it provides a fresh look at more recent major theoretical debates in this area of scientific research and a rigorous analysis of one of its most central major theories. Rigorous theoretical work is integrated with objective consideration of relevant empirical evidence, making the discussions robust and clear. As a result, the book shows that MTHC provides a significant theoretical contribution for the field of cognitive science. The content is useful for those interested in theoretical and empirical issues concerning major theories in the contemporary field of cognitive science.
Book Synopsis The Mechanistic Conception of Life by : Jacques Loeb
Download or read book The Mechanistic Conception of Life written by Jacques Loeb and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Book Synopsis The New Mechanical Philosophy by : Stuart Glennan
Download or read book The New Mechanical Philosophy written by Stuart Glennan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.
Book Synopsis The Systems View of Life by : Fritjof Capra
Download or read book The Systems View of Life written by Fritjof Capra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume to integrate life's biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions into a single, coherent framework.
Book Synopsis Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics by : Hsiang-Ke Chao
Download or read book Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics written by Hsiang-Ke Chao and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses fundamental issues in the philosophy of science in the context of two most intriguing fields: biology and economics. Written by authorities and experts in the philosophy of biology and economics, Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics provides a structured study of the concepts of mechanism and causality in these disciplines and draws careful juxtapositions between philosophical apparatus and scientific practice. By exploring the issues that are most salient to the contemporary philosophies of biology and economics and by presenting comparative analyses, the book serves as a platform not only for gaining mutual understanding between scientists and philosophers of the life sciences and those of the social sciences, but also for sharing interdisciplinary research that combines both philosophical concepts in both fields. The book begins by defining the concepts of mechanism and causality in biology and economics, respectively. The second and third parts investigate philosophical perspectives of various causal and mechanistic issues in scientific practice in the two fields. These two sections include chapters on causal issues in the theory of evolution; experiments and scientific discovery; representation of causal relations and mechanism by models in economics. The concluding section presents interdisciplinary studies of various topics concerning extrapolation of life sciences and social sciences, including chapters on the philosophical investigation of conjoining biological and economic analyses with, respectively, demography, medicine and sociology.
Book Synopsis Mechanism by : Domenico Bertoloni Meli
Download or read book Mechanism written by Domenico Bertoloni Meli and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mechanical philosophy first emerged as a leading player on the intellectual scene in the early modern period—seeking to explain all natural phenomena through the physics of matter and motion—and the term mechanism was coined. Over time, natural phenomena came to be understood through machine analogies and explanations and the very word mechanism, a suggestive and ambiguous expression, took on a host of different meanings. Emphasizing the important role of key ancient and early modern protagonists, from Galen to Robert Boyle, this book offers a historical investigation of the term mechanism from the late Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when it was used rather frequently in complex debates about the nature of the notion of the soul. In this rich and detailed study, Domenico Bertoloni Melifocuses on strategies for discussing the notion of mechanism in historically sensitive ways; the relation between mechanism, visual representation, and anatomy; the usage and meaning of the term in early modern times; and Marcello Malpighi and the problems of fecundation and generation, among the most challenging topics to investigate from a mechanistic standpoint.
Book Synopsis The Manipulated Mechanism by : Donald Edward Goodman-Wilson
Download or read book The Manipulated Mechanism written by Donald Edward Goodman-Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent work in the philosophy of biology has sought after an account of mechanistic explanation. Biologists frequently encounter causal relationships that beg for explanation. For example, genes appear to encode for particular phenotypes. How does gene expression work? Biologists posit mechanisms to explain the link between cause and effect. Thus, gene expression would be explained by an appeal to a complex mechanism linking the gene to the phenotype, as such an appeal will provide answers to broad ranges of "how" and "why" questions about the causal relationship, and predict novel effects. Here, I focus on a recent problem raised for mechanistic explanation. Mechanism discovery is an inferential process which takes empirical data as premises, and produces a causal model of a mechanism as the conclusion. Such an inferential process requires rules, yet few accounts of mechanistic explanation attempt to provide them. Such inferential rules could be used to answer related normative questions facing accounts of mechanistic explanation. In particular, they can be brought to bear on questions of explanatory relevance: Which components are part of the mechanism, and how can we know? and questions of explanatory adequacy: When is a mechanistic explanation a good explanation? I argue that a formal account of mechanistic explanation grounded in a manipulationist account of causation can answer these kinds of question. A thoroughgoing defense of my account, however, requires that I defend its assumptions. Among the assumptions is the highly contentious principle known as `modularity'. Modularity is the claim that we must be able to independently manipulate each of the various components in a mechanism. The final chapters of my dissertation focus on a thoroughgoing defense of modularity against claims that it is frequently violated, conceptually intractable, or simply inapplicable to especially biological systems.
Book Synopsis A General Explanation-Based Learning Mechanism and Its Application to Narrative Understanding by : Raymond J. Mooney
Download or read book A General Explanation-Based Learning Mechanism and Its Application to Narrative Understanding written by Raymond J. Mooney and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 1990 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By Raymond J. Mooney.
Book Synopsis Mechanistic Criminology by : K. Ryan Proctor
Download or read book Mechanistic Criminology written by K. Ryan Proctor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The science of criminology is at a crossroads. Despite accumulating a dizzying array of facts about crime, the field has yet to identify a body of theories that allows for the adequate prediction, explanation, and control of phenomena of central interest to criminologists. Mechanistic Criminology locates this problem within the field’s failure to conform to the expectations of scientific fields and reliance on antiquated methods of theory construction. The authors contend that this failure has resulted in an inability of criminologists to engage in theory falsification and competition—two central activities of science—that produce the forms of reliable knowledge that are unique to scientific fields. Mechanistic Criminology advocates for the adoption of a mechanistic mode of theorizing to allow criminologists to engage in theory falsification and competition and ignite rapid scientific discovery in the field. The proposed method is the same one employed within the biological sciences, which is responsible for their rapid scientific progress in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Should criminologists adopt this mechanistic approach, criminology could experience the same scientific revolution that is occurring in the biological sciences, and criminologists would generate the knowledge necessary for the prediction, explanation, and control of crime.
Book Synopsis Varieties of Understanding by : Stephen R. Grimm
Download or read book Varieties of Understanding written by Stephen R. Grimm and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of understanding, raising questions about what understanding looks like from different perspectives and exploring how ordinary people use the notion of understanding. According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world-that it calls on different cognitive resources and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus, in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed-mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. This volume brings together some of the world's leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in order to shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.
Download or read book New Mechanism written by João L. Cordovil and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-13 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book addresses the epistemological and ontological significance as well as the scope of new mechanism. In particular, this book addresses the issues of what is "new" about new mechanism, the epistemological and ontological reasons underlying the adoption of mechanistic instead of other modelling strategies as well as the possibility of mechanistic explanation to accommodate a non-trivial notion of emergence. Arguably, new mechanism has been particularly successful in making sense of scientific practice in the molecular life sciences. But what about other sciences? This book enlarges the context of analysis, addressing the issue of the putative compatibility between the current ways of conceiving new mechanism and actual scientific practices in quantum physics, chemistry, biochemistry, developmental biology and the cognitive sciences.
Book Synopsis The Cognitive Science of Science by : Paul Thagard
Download or read book The Cognitive Science of Science written by Paul Thagard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-04-06 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cognitive science perspective on scientific development, drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling. Many disciplines, including philosophy, history, and sociology, have attempted to make sense of how science works. In this book, Paul Thagard examines scientific development from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science. Cognitive science combines insights from researchers in many fields: philosophers analyze historical cases, psychologists carry out behavioral experiments, neuroscientists perform brain scans, and computer modelers write programs that simulate thought processes. Thagard develops cognitive perspectives on the nature of explanation, mental models, theory choice, and resistance to scientific change, considering disbelief in climate change as a case study. He presents a series of studies that describe the psychological and neural processes that have led to breakthroughs in science, medicine, and technology. He shows how discoveries of new theories and explanations lead to conceptual change, with examples from biology, psychology, and medicine. Finally, he shows how the cognitive science of science can integrate descriptive and normative concerns; and he considers the neural underpinnings of certain scientific concepts.
Download or read book Systems Biology written by Fred Boogerd and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Systems biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry. Studying the philosophical foundations of systems biology may resolve a longer standing issue, i.e., the extent to which Biology is entitled to its own scientific foundations rather than being dominated by existing philosophies.* Answers the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living* An in-depth look to a vigorous and expanding discipline, from molecule to system* Explores the region between individual components and the system
Book Synopsis Philosophy in the Modern World by : Anthony Kenny
Download or read book Philosophy in the Modern World written by Anthony Kenny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here readers will find not only an authoritative guide to the history of philosophy, but also a compelling introduction to every major area of philosophical inquiry.
Book Synopsis Scientific Explanation in Biology by : Roger Deulofeu Batllori
Download or read book Scientific Explanation in Biology written by Roger Deulofeu Batllori and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Understanding how scientists explain has been one of the major goals of the philosophy of science. Given that explaining is one of the most important tasks that scientists aim at and given the high specialization that currently affects all scientific disciplines, we encounter what might at first glance appear to us as many different types of explanations and very different ways of explaining natural phenomena. This suggests a pluralist picture regarding scientific explanation, particularly in biology, namely the existence of different accounts of explanation that do not share an interesting common core. However, the main goal of the traditional analysis of scientific explanation was to elaborate a monist theory of explanation according to which all scientific explanations share a common core that makes them what they are - i.e. that they can be identified by a commonly shared set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. The monist accounts mainly draw on examples from physics to illustrate how this is supposed to work, leaving examples from the special science, like biology, aside.In the last twenty years, nonetheless, the rise of the New Mechanism philosophy, with its notion of mechanistic explanation, has become the dominant and widely accepted account among the philosophers of science to analyze scientific explanation in biology, challenging the pluralist view. The New mechanist account of scientific explanation is essentially monist since their defenders claim that mechanisms are all what really matters to explanation. According to mechanistic explanation, in order to explain a biological phenomenon, we have to discover the mechanism that is responsible for it. Further, we have to decompose this mechanism in order to identify its component parts and identify the causal story that connects the components with the phenomenon. Mechanistic explanations are thus considered causal explanations.The New Mechanism philosophy has arguably been very successful in analyzing how explanation works in a huge diversity of models in biology, suggesting that their account of mechanistic explanation is the only legitimate of in biology. Furthermore, New Mechanism philosophy provides a new framework that contributed to tackle traditional problems of the philosophy of science related to notions such as laws of nature, function, causation, etc.Although mechanistic explanation has proved very successful in analyzing the explanatory force of many biological models, its scope in biology is still under discussion. In the last few years, there has been voices limiting the extension of this account. On the one hand, there has been philosophers claiming that in some biological models, mathematics plays not only a representational role but an explanatory role, suggesting that those models provide explanations that rather than identifying a mechanism with its components and causal story, identify mathematical properties that are explanatory of some phenomenon. They claim that in those explanations, the system under analysis has a mathematical structure whose mathematical properties are explanatory of a particular range of explananda. On the other hand, and despite the claim widely accepted that there are no laws in biology, some philosophers claim we can still consider that some biological models explain by appeal to laws of nature, suggesting covering law accounts of scientific explanation.The present thesis dissertation is a contribution to the aforementioned debate. It provides examples of biological models whose explanatory power does not lie in its identification of mechanisms with its parts and causal story, even if the models look somehow mechanistic. I claim they provide non-mechanistic (and non-causal) explanations, in so far as the models, even if they could identify a mechanism, do not explain by pinpointing information about its causal story."-- TDX.
